What the president's new tax plan could mean for Californians, Hugh Hefner's unexpected legacy in LA, La Raza newspaper sheds light on the Chicano rights movement.
Tax plan tension: Californians could take hit under Trump's proposal
President Trump pitched his tax plan in Indianapolis Wednesday, saying it will make the tax code "simple and fair."
But early analysis shows it might just be a little less fair for Californians. Much of the current concern is centered around California's state and local tax deduction or "SALT."
Currently, individuals can deduct SALTs from their federal income tax. But the Trump tax plan could end it.
L.A. Times congressional reporter Sarah Wire says that could have some adverse political ramifications for Republicans:
"It affects a lot of middle and upper-class areas, which means that places like Orange County where Democrats are focused at this time could lose a lot."
To hear more about how people with mortgages higher than $500,000 could be affected, click the blue play button above.
A 6.0 magnitude earthquake is imminent, according to Earthquake Potential Score
After hurricanes pummeled the southeast and temblors toppled buildings south of the border, the possibility of a mega-quake striking here in SoCal is on people's minds. As if all the disasters of the past month weren't enough. Now there's something else to make us uneasy.
It's called the EPS, or Earthquake Potential Score—a measure that determines the likelihood of a disastrous quake. And the EPS for the LA region right now is 80.3 percent. It was 77.8 percent just before the 1994 quake in Northridge.
John Rundle is a professor of geology and physics at UC Davis. He's part of a team compiling EPS data. He explained to Take Two host A Martinez how he got that number.
"There are 1,000 magnitude three's for every magnitude six. So at the last magnitude six, we start counting magnitude threes and when we get to 1,000, you'd expect another magnitude six...
So, the EPS score comes basically from counting those small earthquakes."
It's done through a method called 'nowcasting,' a term borrowed from economics.
"A nowcast is an estimate in economics of the gross domestic product using proxy data or substitute data. That's where this idea comes from that we can determine the current hazard that a region such as Los Angeles is subject to by looking at the number of small earthquakes and counting them."
To hear more about what the Earthquake Potential Score means for Angelenos, click the blue play button above.
Mexico quake relief: Many supplies are needed, but not used clothes
How Hugh Hefner helped save the Hollywood sign
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner passed away Wednesday at the age of 91. How he'll be remembered depends on your point of view. Hefner was polarizing, to say the least. But one thing most people agree about was his love for Hollywood, specifically the Hollywood sign.
In the late 1970s, the sign that read "Hollywoodland" was a wreck and Hefner took note.
"Clearly the town had forgotten it or it wouldn't have been in such terrible disrepair. To say it was in disrepair is an understatement because it was falling apart."
That's from the documentary, "Under the Hollywood Sign." It was going to cost $250,000 to replace the letters, so Hefner decided to help. He held a fundraiser at the Playboy mansion where each letter was auctioned off to people like Gene Autry to pay for the fix.
"Hugh Hefner was really instrumental in restoring the Hollywood sign to give it its current look and its current status," said USC professor and Hollywood historian Leo Braudy.
Braudy says Hefner was new to L.A. at the time, so the sign held a certain amount of mystique for him.
"The sign was sort of like an afterthought to people who lived here, especially to people in the movie business. The sign didn't have that iconic quality to people who were native Angelenos that it did to people who were outsiders, and Hugh Hefner was one of those outsiders."
To hear about Hugh Hefner's connection to the Hollywood sign, click the blue play button above.
California health clinics risk losing hundreds of millions if Congress doesn’t act
Teachers and firefighters can't afford housing -- Anderson Forecast says share their costs
When it comes to desirable places to live, Southern California is pretty up there. And so is the cost of housing. While a handful of housing bills in Sacramento wait to become law, researchers with the UCLA Anderson Forecast say they won't do much to address the immediate crisis. They propose a different strategy to alleviate the affordable housing problem.
Take Two's A Martinez spoke with Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the Anderson Forecast.
"If we're not going to be able to provide affordable housing, what we need to do as a community is decide who gets affordable housing," Nickelsburg said. "One way is to say we would like teachers to live in the community where they teach. In order to do that, they have to be able to afford to live there. An alternative would be for the school district or the city or the county to go in partnership with those teachers. So, most people want to own their own homes. If you can't own a $600,000 home, maybe the school district can own $300,000 of that, and you, the school teacher, can own the other $300,000. And you do an equity sharing."
Nickelsburg says any job classification could be chosen for shared-cost housing, as long is it's important to the community. He understands why some people wouldn't want their tax dollars to help someone else own a home when they can't afford one themselves, but he says overall, it's the most cost-effective method.
"You either do that or the alternative is that to get good teachers you're going to have to pay the teachers more anyway," Nickelsburg said. "So in fact, one would be paying either way. And this is a way to keep communities with a more broader socioeconomic complexion than simply having people priced out... or decide that maybe teaching or being a policeman or a fireman in Salt Lake City or Denver is just a better option than in California."
To hear the full conversation with Jerry Nickelsburg, click on the media player below.
The Ride: Will California ban vehicles that run on gas and diesel?
France and the United Kingdom are doing it, and maybe China too. And now it's possible California could also ban the sale of new vehicles powered with internal combustion engines.
"Given the existential challenge we face, the administration is looking at many, many possible measures – including additional action on electric vehicles – to help rapidly decarbonize the economy and protect the health of our citizens," California Air Resources Board spokesman, Dave Clegern, said on behalf of Governor Jerry Brown's office.
Earlier this week, ARB chief Mary Nichols told Bloomberg news that the governor has been asking her why California isn't phasing out fossil-fuel vehicles when China has said it will as soon as 2030. Governor Brown met with Chinese president Xi Jinping earlier this year about speeding up the adoption of electric vehicles to help offset climate change.
Rapid adoption of electric vehicles is a critical goal for California as it seeks to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. For the state to stay on track, California will need to replace combustion with renewables no later than 2050, Nichols told Bloomberg, adding that the earliest California would ban gas- and diesel-powered cars would be ten years from now.
Visual, visceral accounts of the Chicano movement on display at the Autry museum
It's one thing to read stories about the Chicano Rights movement, or maybe to hear your parents or grandparents talk about those days, 50 years ago. It's another thing entirely to see the photos of the actual people who made it happen. And that's what you can do at the Autry Museum of the American West in Griffith Park.
La Raza, one of the many exhibits in Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, highlights visual accounts of the movement as told through a local newspaper, "La Raza," that was published in Los Angeles from 1967-1977.
The exhibit was curated by the Autry's Amy Scott and Luis Garza, who was a staff photographer for the publication. They sifted through thousands of archival images and pulled the 270 that are on display.
A Martinez caught up with Scott, the Autry's Chief Curator. Here are some interview highlights:
We're in the midst of a couple hundred black and white photos from the pages of "La Raza." What was the purpose of this publication?
"La Raza" really countered mainstream biases and stereotypes of Mexican Americans as being somehow outside of society and therefor not entitled to the American Dream. It was also, I think, one of the first sort of Chicano-oriented publications to really get the importance of the visual. By that I mean not just photography but arts, graphics, political cartoons, satire, montage — with all of these media together, working in the service of the Chicano perspective.
It sounds like "La Raza" knew they had to be at least a little different than the L.A. Times, the Herald Examiner, all of the mainstream newspapers.
One of the major concerns of the Chicano movement and one of the many issues they were seeking to redress is what they felt to be biased, misrepresentations, racist stereotypes perpetuated by the mainstream media.
We're looking at a photo called "La Marcha de la Reconquista." Tell us about what this photo is representing.
This was a really interesting moment within than the Chicano movement. It's a thousand-mile march that takes place over three months and is organized by the Brown Berets, from Calexico on the border to Sacramento, the capital. People either joined in or dropped out along the way. There were buses and the community people came out to feed them.
It's just really this amazing community-oriented reconquest.
There are photos of people with injuries. Someone standing with blood on his white t-shirts, someone else with bruises on their arms, someone else with a bandage.
Stitches, bleeding, bandages, scars, broken bones even. These images are among the most interesting in the entire archive. Although they could be kind of tough to look at, one of the main issues taken up by Chicano activists was police harassment and brutality as well as what they deemed to be a biased or unfair court system in which they lacked adequate representation. These are portraits, very much in the traditional sense of the term, of somebody who is vulnerable who has been victimized but is also persistent and resilient.
What kind of stories did Luis tell you about working there?
Some of them were really intense. They apparently got raided — not infrequently. He also tells this one story of how they were throwing cameras and film canisters and everything out the window as police were knocking on the front door.
The same story that was probably in all the other major publications was also in "La Raza." They both had very different perspectives.
It wasn't only about speaking to those dramatic and violent moments and clashes. It was also about portraying the community that was large, that was complex, that was dynamic and diverse — all of the moments in between the big marches and the dramatic conflicts. In that regard, it was completely unlike any other visual account that I'm aware of from the Civil Rights movement. In photography from the south east and the black Civil Rights movement that took place elsewhere, you either have dramatic and violent and often violent moments or it tends to be centered on iconic and charismatic leaders. This has those things but it has everything else in between.
It's also by the community and therefore truly of the community, where a lot of the other Civil Rights images we now recognize as being iconic of that era were taken by people outside of those cultures.
The photography exhibit La Raza is at the Autry Museum of the American West into February 2019.